Sophie Coignard and Marie-Thérèse Guichard are both journalists at Le Point. Sophie Coignard is the author, with Alexandre Wickham, of a best-seller: La Nomenklatura française [the French Nomenclatura] (Belfond, 1986). Marie-Thérèse Guichard is author of several publications including Le Président qui aimait les femmes [the President Who Loved Women] (Laffont, 1993).

They were born in the same region, went to the same schools, fought the same fights and made the same mistakes in youth. They share the same morals, the same fantasies of success and the same taste for money. They act behind the scenes to help...

They were born in the same region, went to the same schools, fought the same fights and made the same mistakes in youth. They share the same morals, the same fantasies of success and the same taste for money. They act behind the scenes to help each other, boosting careers, monopolizing business and information, making money, conspiring and, why not, becoming Presidents! From Corsica, the Corréze, Auvergne, Brittany and Savoy, former «collaborationists» and free-masons; homosexuals and aristocrats; tax inspectors and ex-Trotskyites; hunters and golfers; Jews and Protestants... they all belong to a network, and sometimes to several.

Multiple and unofficial, these places of complicity draw a hidden geography of French society. They explain more surely than official communiqués the decisions, the nominations, the transactions that take place. To write this secret history of networks, Sophie Coignard and Marie-Thérèse Guichard questioned actors and observers of these secret solidarities in every milieu, every region, every class. From the «Make Yourself Comfortable» brotherhood to the laundry «gang», the mountain «red necks» to the «brothers» of the Mediterranean Coast, from the clan from the Charente to the club of new capitalists, heirs to the thieves' cloaks to plotters in priests' cassocks... they lift the veil from all these subterranean understandings which glue together France.